Jackrabbit Ridge had a handful of houses along it, mostly occupied by people who wanted to stay off the grid and away from the prying eyes of the federal government. They drove pickups and American-made SUVs festooned with flags and testimonials to their love of hunting and guns in general. Farther toward the national park there were side streets whose signs had long since been knocked down or stolen, so she did not know their names. There were some homes similar to the ones on the main road—although just thinking of Jackrabbit Ridge as a main road gave it far too much credit—but there were also two startlingly suburban-looking developments of single-family homes. Some of them were occupied, others abandoned or never sold, and more than one had been left half-built when the local economy proved unable to support middle-class dreams on Jackrabbit Ridge.
Trinity glanced out the window. They’d ridden in silence, she in the passenger seat and Oleg behind the wheel. Gavril had gotten in back and spent most of the ride with his head leaning against the window, striking the glass every time they hit a bump or a pothole. The air inside the car felt haunted by the unspoken awareness of the dead man in the trunk. Feliks had been their friend—to Oleg and Gavril he had been close to a brother—and they could smell his blood in the car, slipping up through the air vents somehow or just seeping through the backseat.
Numb, Trinity put a hand on Oleg’s thigh just to tell him he wasn’t alone. He didn’t pull away, and that was good. These men were supposed to be cold. In the past, when she’d implied that Oleg might be allowed to have emotions, that he didn’t have to be the hard-edged thug that Kirill Sokolov and the others wanted him to be, he had pulled away from her. She knew his heart—knew without a shred of doubt that he had a soul and a conscience—but she also knew that the Bratva was his life, his world, and his brotherhood. It was all he knew, and he measured himself by how much his brothers needed him.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
In the backseat, Gavril’s head banged the window. They hadn’t hit a bump or a pothole.
Outside the car, the moon and stars made a ghost land of the desert, and Trinity thought that was only right. It felt to her that they were all ghosts out here, that there was no real difference between the living and the dead.
Pretty soon that might not be far from the truth.
They hit a bump and something rattled in the trunk. The corpse of their friend wasn’t the only thing back there. They had the guns.
Trinity would have thought the price they’d paid for those guns was too high, except without them they would all have been dead soon enough. Now, with the weapons and ammunition they’d taken from Oscar Temple, they had a chance.
In the distance, she could see what remained of Storyland. Built in the 1980s, it had been a minor amusement park aimed at small children, full of shoddy attractions based on fairy tales and nursery rhymes. Mother Goose and Hansel and Gretel figured prominently, and, from what Trinity had learned, the attractions had included a track for antique cars, spinning teacups, a flying carpet ride, and other rides that would be eclipsed by even the least sophisticated modern theme park … all of this a relatively short drive from downtown Las Vegas.
The headlights picked out the shape of the Wonderland Hotel. Oleg tapped the brake and guided the car around the back of the building. The Wonderland had one tall wing and one short one, which met at the two-story lobby structure. Another section of the hotel stuck out the back in a T shape, which allowed for the rooms along the rear leg of the T to be invisible from the few cars that made their way along Jackrabbit Ridge. Gravel crunched beneath the tires as they pulled up in the midst of the five other vehicles parked there.
The door to one of the abandoned hotel’s rooms opened, and Kirill emerged with a pistol and a bottle of beer. Perhaps forty-five years old, Kirill had skin so leathery that its lines seemed more like scars. He kept his remaining hair buzzed tight to his scalp, and he had icy, blue-white eyes that never smiled, even when he himself might laugh. Louis Drinkwater—who’d told Trinity everything she knew about the area—was a local real estate agent who owed Kirill Sokolov many favors and owed the Bratva tens of thousands of dollars. He’d given them the keys to the Wonderland Hotel. Sokolov didn’t trust Louis, but Trinity did. The real estate man had more than his share of sorrow, but he didn’t strike her as a coward.
Still, they kept watch. Someone would have been on guard in the front, hiding behind darkened windows. Kirill would have known they were coming, but still he had the gun. It was impossible to be too careful.
They should have been more careful with Oscar Temple.
Kirill watched them as they climbed from the car, his brow furrowed. He said something in Russian. Trinity heard Feliks’s name and knew what he was asking.
“In the trunk,” Oleg replied.
Kirill swore and cast his beer aside, striding toward the car as Oleg went around to the back, keys in hand. Trinity refused to look, marching toward the room she and Oleg had been sharing. She halted before she reached it and forced herself to turn and watch as they opened the car trunk and Kirill clapped his hands to the sides of his skull.
Grieving for his brother.
No one brought up the fact that they’d managed to get the guns. It was important—it might give them the edge they needed to survive, maybe even win—but Kirill Sokolov didn’t care about guns just then. He leaned against the car, lay his head back, and stared at the stars.
Trinity wasn’t close enough to see if he cried.
The Wonderland Hotel had been their refuge for weeks, but none of them had expected to be buried there.
* * *
On long rides, Jax couldn’t help thinking about his little brother Tommy. With the sky spreading out in front of him and the road whipping by beneath him, he could hear Tommy’s laughter. There’d been many times when Jax, six years older, had been appointed guardian and protector for his brother while JT had worked on restoring a vintage Harley he’d picked up somewhere.
Gemma would be making dinner. Jax would take Tommy out to the small yard or to the concrete basketball square next door, the one with the dingy, torn net hanging from the hoop … and they’d run. They never had a destination, the Teller boys—they just ran. From the time Tommy could walk, they would run together. Sometimes they would put out their arms and fly together, or pretend they were astride a Harley when they were far too young to ride. By the time Jax turned eleven, his urgency had faded a little and Tommy tended to take the lead, even though he was only five years old.
At six, Tommy had died of a congenital heart defect. It was the family flaw—Gemma had it, too.
Jax didn’t do a lot of running these days—not unless there was trouble. But on these long rides, he remembered what it had felt like to fly with his little brother. Those memories should have caused him pain, made him grieve, but instead they made him happy. For a little while, Tommy was with him again. He wondered if his sons, Abel and Thomas—named after an uncle he’d never known—would run together. Jax hoped that they would.
Three headlights cut the darkness out on that ribbon of highway. Jax, Opie, and Chibs had been riding for a couple of hours already, and they wound along two-lane blacktop that curved through pine forests, up hills, and into canyons. Later, they would ride through desolate badlands that had a rugged beauty all their own, but long after dark in the middle of a workweek, these roads could be just as desolate. Quiet and peaceful.
He felt the weight of the gun at the small of his back and knew that quiet and peaceful were good. Less chance of trouble.
Opie rode on his left and Chibs on his right. When a car or truck appeared coming the other direction, Opie dropped behind them, but vehicles had been few and far between for the past three quarters of an hour or so. Opie had been his best friend pretty much all his life. He had a gentle soul and a savage heart, able to find mercy where others could not and to be merciless when a line had been crossed. Jax worried about Opie—the loss of his first wife had broken something inside him
—but when shit turned ugly, there was no one he’d rather have at his back. Chibs had survived ugliness and tragedy, too. A son of a bitch named Jimmy O had given him the scars on his face, stolen away his wife and daughter, and made it impossible for him to stay in Ireland and keep drawing breath. Jimmy O was dead now, but somehow betrayal had made Chibs understand loyalty better than anyone else.
Jax had unwavering faith in both men. Out here, flying, these guys were his brothers now. He trusted them with his life.
* * *
Kirill asked Trinity to say a prayer over his brother’s grave. They stood there, nineteen Russian men and this one Irish girl—no longer such a girl—and lowered their heads. In the moonlight, the dirt on the arms and faces of those who’d dug the grave made them look like orphans out of some grim, modern Charles Dickens tale. They didn’t have much use for God. They were gunmen and leg breakers. Since the moment Oleg had begun introducing Trinity around to his Bratva when they’d been in Belfast, she had tried very hard not to wonder what their worst crimes might have been. Drug smuggling, certainly. Murder? Some of them, she was sure. They were hard men, and some of them seemed like cruel men, but to Oleg they were family, and if she wanted him, she knew that they were part of the package.
Quietly, her voice carrying in the reverent hush that the small hours always created, she said the Lord’s Prayer. When she’d finished, they all said, “Amen,” almost as if they meant it. Most of them were godless, but she’d found that even those without faith still wished their loved ones a safe journey through whatever might come after life.
“Feliks was a man of few words, so I won’t disturb the quiet with a lot o’ my own,” Trinity said. She glanced at Oleg and then at Kirill, whose expression had never been more like stone. There would be no tears from this lot. “He had courage and dignity, and he defended his brothers with his life. God keep him.”
For several seconds they all stood there, staring at the freshly turned soil. The wind blew, and somewhere a loose shutter creaked in the dark like the squeal of a frightened rat. They had dug the grave in the scrubland behind the motel, fifty yards back from the cracked, empty swimming pool.
Kirill realized she wasn’t going to say anything more and cleared his throat of whatever thickness of emotion had lodged there.
“The traitors have taken another life,” he said, speaking English purely for her benefit.
He’d mourned in his native tongue, but now he clearly wanted to include her, and it touched her deeply. For a long time she had been nothing but Oleg’s woman to them, but now that they were at war, she had become family, for better or worse.
“Krupin and the others might not have been at Temple’s ranch, but it was for them Temple acted. For Lagoshin. Feliks’s blood is on his hands. Another of us dead because Lagoshin wants the Bratva business in this part of the world for himself. We have … What would they say here? Rules. These men have betrayed us all. They have murdered those who should be their brothers. We have been forced to strike from the shadows, to hide our heads because they have numbers and weapons we could not match. But now that has changed.”
Kirill nodded at Oleg, Gavril, and Trinity in turn.
“We have as many weapons as we have hands and enough ammunition to kill our enemies and their entire families.”
He surveyed those gathered around him. A chill went through Trinity, and she wiped tears and smudged dirt from her cheeks.
“Feliks died for these guns,” Kirill said. “And we will use every last bullet.”
Oleg nodded slowly, lips pressed into a tight line. “Amen,” he said, as if Kirill’s declaration had been another prayer.
“Amen,” the rest of them echoed.
Trinity felt sick. Feliks’s death, the digging of his grave, and this pauper’s funeral had disturbed her enough, but this …
She whispered her own private little prayer and turned away, walking back across the rough ground and past the empty pool.
Oleg caught up to her just as she was entering their room, took her wrist and followed her inside, closing the door behind them. Her heart pounded, and she felt her face flush as tears spilled down her cheeks. She hated herself for crying, hated the vulnerability it made her feel, even though she believed that empathy showed strength, not weakness. Angrily, she wiped her eyes again.
“What is it?” Oleg asked.
Trinity turned away from him. “You mean besides Feliks being dead? Isn’t that enough?”
Oleg grunted. He did that a lot. It was practically a third language for him.
“There is more. You turned your back on us, came rushing back here. Something upset you, and it wasn’t just Feliks dying.”
He touched her shoulder and she pulled away, then spun to face him.
“It wasn’t a prayer,” she whispered, barely controlling her fury.
Oleg frowned, grunted again.
“What Kirill said? I understand it. You don’t grow up like I did and not understand violence … vengeance. I’m not gonna try to persuade you to turn the other cheek, ’cause in my life turnin’ the other cheek just means givin’ the bullet a clear path to your brain. But bloodlust is not prayer.”
“Of course it’s not!” Oleg snapped, throwing up his hands. “You think we don’t know that?”
Trinity scoffed. “You said, ‘Amen.’ You all did.”
“And what does it mean, ‘Amen’?” Oleg said quietly, reaching out to touch her face, to lift her chin so that she would look him in the eye and see the love he had for her. “It means ‘I believe,’ Trinity. When I said it, that’s all I meant. The others just repeated it.”
She closed her eyes tightly and let out a shuddering breath. His touch had broken a dam of emotion within her, but somehow this wave of grief and anger stopped the flow of her tears.
“Don’t say it like that again, okay? It means somethin’ real to me.”
Oleg kissed her forehead. “I promise,” he said.
He kissed her gently on the lips, and then more firmly, and she pressed her body against his and let all of her emotions crash into him, shared it with him in a way she never had with anyone. She trusted him with all she felt, love and fear and rage.
To the end.
* * *
The eastern sky had begun to lighten by the time Jax, Chibs, and Opie rolled into North Las Vegas. It had been a long time since either Jax or Chibs had paid the North Vegas charter a visit, but Opie had never been there before. Bone-tired, his jaw tight and his hands aching from gripping so long, Jax guided them into the parking lot of the Tombstone Bar, so named because the building had once housed a business that sold gravestones and other funerary monuments. The growl of the Harleys’ engines echoed off the bar and the building across the lot, loud in the darkness just before dawn.
The Tombstone was a grade-A shithole, a dive with a faded, tilted sign above the door and dying neon beer logos in the windows that burned 24-7. It had just about the least curb appeal of any bar Jax had ever seen, which made it perfect for SAMNOV to use as the legitimate front for whatever illegal business they might do. Truth was, the North Vegas charter didn’t invest a lot of time or energy into criminal enterprise. Their president, Rollie Thurman, didn’t have much ambition beyond the fraternity of the club. He liked the bar, enjoyed its reputation as a dive and the sort of clientele that dragged itself through the door on a nightly basis. The way Jax remembered it, when Rollie wasn’t busy, he liked to tend bar himself, listen to tales of woe from drunks and hookers, junkies and gamblers, and the occasional cop. SAMNOV pulled their weight when it came to fulfilling their obligations, protecting gun shipments, doing whatever distribution was required—and they’d gone to war to protect their territory more than once—but Rollie liked things simple and quiet.
Jax was counting on that.
He killed his engine, slipped off his helmet, and ran a hand through his hair. He hadn’t gotten used to the shorter length, but it helped on a ride like this. Opie and Chibs shut off their bi
kes and dismounted. Chibs opened and closed his hands a few times even as Jax was massaging his own knuckles. They’d stopped plenty of times to piss and take a breather, but his hands still felt tight. He tried to imagine how much pain Clay was in every time they rode, given how bad his arthritis had gotten, and hoped he’d never have to endure that curse.
Opie gestured across the parking lot. “What’s the story on that?”
Jax turned and smiled at the sight of the sign on the building next door. Once upon a time—he figured in the ’70s and ’80s—it had been a two-screen movie theater, one of those storefront jobs that had existed before the megaplexes had come along. Last time he’d been there, it had been a furniture showroom or something, but now it was a theater again.
The Tombstone Theatre. The marquee offered up a Hitchcock double bill and a midnight show of something called Bubba Ho-Tep.
“Looks like Thor got his wish,” Jax said. “Guy’s been talking about the charter buying that place and getting it running again for eight, nine years.”
Chibs strode up between them. “You’d think the local law might get a bit suspicious when you’ve got two legit businesses guaranteed to lose money but somehow you manage to keep ’em going.”
Jax shrugged. “As long as they pay their taxes, I guess.”
They had pulled their bikes around the side of the bar. Behind it was a small paved yard enclosed with a chain-link fence, and Jax spotted a restored Ford Mustang, an old white box truck with the bar’s name on the side, and four motorcycles. The eastern sky had continued to brighten, hinting at the approach of dawn and turning much of the sky a rich indigo. They walked toward the heavy old wooden door that, despite its appearance, was used by the charter as a side entrance to their clubhouse, which was in the rear of the building that housed the Tombstone Bar.
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